Mazer23's comments

Cool. It looks like they're trying to solve a lot of the same problems we are at Pixite. Unbound is our solution for this:

http://unboundformac.com/dropbox.html

I'm interested to see where they go with it and how they approach the problem differently.

This sounds a lot like the problem we're trying to crack with our photo app suite 'unbound':

Http://www.unboundformac.com/dropbox.html

All your photos on Dropbox and synced to all you iOS devices and macs.

It wasn't too bad, it took a few hours to get the basics up and running, then there was quite a bit of tweaking. The leap sdk is coming together but theres still a lot for developers to do. There are gestures but you still need to roll quite a bit yourself. I'm going to do another post much more in depth about the gestures and how to handle them in the next week or two.

Using print as an example of good high resolution design is interesting, but it misses one of the main reasons we have drop shadows and fake textures in non-print design.

Drop shadows and textures provide affordances and a visual language to communicate what a user can and should interact with on screen. They provide a visual hierarchy to the user so they can easily see what is content and what is interactive, etc.

Print has no interaction, so it's a bit naive to say we're going back to print aesthetics. We need a new way forward that provides both. Web apps have been experimenting with this for a while now. Some of these ideas work, some don't, but we can't just pretend print design has all the answers.

I'm pretty sure Airplay does exactly what you're talking about. If you play a video from YouTube or even streamed off your computer via airvideo, the apple tv connects to the server directly and the iPad or iPhone just acts as a remote. It doesn't use battery or network.

It's just seamless and you don't need to know how it works to use it.

Where did you study Interaction Design? I'm getting in a masters in it at CMU after getting an electrical engineering BS. The masters here is a great program.

My app is heavily effected as well. I have a Picasa client that auto-caches photos for users. The app manages the cache and clears it when needed, but certain albums can be manually set to cache by users so they're never deleted. I wouldn't want all these photos backed up and I don't think apple would allow it. Them going through and deleting the data themselves basically breaks the app for our users though.

The app: webalbumsapp.com

I wonder how the awesome sword and spade symbol on this website help him sell whatever he's selling.

The article you're referring to I think was written by Mark Weiser. It was called "The Computer for the 21st Century" unless you were thinking of a different one.

It's quite a vision for 1991:

http://www.ubicomp.com/want/papers/ubi-sciam-sep91.pdf

Sure, but ask any consumer what they think the best brand of tv is and it will probably fall between two or three brands that they can think of. I'm not saying a particular category can't be big enough to support a lot of brands. I'm saying in the consumers mind there are usually just 2 or three they think of.

The author seems to think that because there will be 20 or 50 viable androids they will somehow dominate. It seems to me that this is much more a branding/marketing problem for android.

Categories like this tend to support just two or three brands at the top of consumer mineshare. Think coke vs pepsi or BMW vs mercedes. The problem with android is it's not really a choice for a consumer. By picking android they really need to make a much more complex choice of which actual phone to get. The real choice the consumer is making is iPhone vs droid incredible or some other specific phone. In the end all the manufacturers under the android umbrella are competing with each other as well as the iPhone for mindshare.

I definitely agree that android will have more units out there than iPhone eventually, but I think the iPhone will easily be the brand with the much stronger mindshare in the category. Normal consumers will still see it as iPhone vs all those other phones. Apple will also have the biggest profit in the smart phone category as a result.

Remember, google is selling eyeballs to advertisers, not phones to consumers. They're playing a different game than apple.

Thanks for the feedback. I've definitely thought about the ability to add whole sites to the notes pane as a different take on tabs. This is a great idea but I'll need to work thought the implementation and figure out what the limits of webkit are. There are a lot of other things I want to add but this was an initial release to get a read on how people use the app and what kind of income stream I can expect.

Syncing is also a big deal. I'd love to use the simple note API as a back end if they ever open that up to me.

Apple makes you rate anything that has direct access to the Internet as 17+. Any web browser apps on the store will have a similar rating.

I'll be moving to Pittsburgh to attend CMU grad school (interaction design) this fall. I'd never been there before being accepted but overall I've been really impressed with the city every time I visit.

Its a pretty little city sitting between three rivers and each of its many boroughs have their own style and lots of little shops and restaurants to discover. That along with the super cheap cost to live there make it a very compelling place to live once you get to know it.

It's more about branding than choice. For example BMW is a brand, they pour all their branding energy into their overall brand and each car is just a model number: 3 series, 5 series, etc. Toyota is a brand but it also brands each of it's cars, for example the prius is a very well marketed and focused brand.

Both these marketing strategies work, the question is in android vs iPhone which strategies there are working. I see the droid brand being handled much better by verizon than the android brand is being handled by google. In the end the mind share may be droid vs iphone, but then it's not a software or hardware company that owns the brand, its a network.

Yeah, the "its not even pc vs mac" sentence wasn't really backed up in the post. I didn't want to get into it and get off topic but maybe i shouldn't have worded it like that.

I think the main reason this isn't pc vs Mac now is that with pcs the hardware plays a much smaller role in the user experience than with phones. Windows could present a more unified front on lots of different hardware than the current phone ecosystem can. Also in the early days of the windows vs Mac battle compatibility and workplace computers played a much bigger role in the choice. Those factors let windows get a very solid mind-share foothold even if the underlying ecosystem was just as fragmented.

My guess is that the flash tool-chain will be a lasting reason that it won't get instantly replaced by any of these new frameworks. There are a ton of developers and designers out there that know how to build flash and don't want to start learning new tools in unproven frameworks.

That said, I think the more and more bloated nature of adobe's tools will become a huge weakness. Developers will be able to build tools for much more specific work-flows that feed directly into specific use cases. Sproutcore and this one seem to be aimed at the 'desktop feel' app development for html5, I'm guessing there will be other frameworks and tools for creating games, vector animations, silly interactive websites, etc. Each of tho uses should grow it's own tool/framework specific for the task

So apple bought sproutCore right? How is this different? or is it a next step from sproutCore?

I did code this using the uigesturecontroller, no private Apis involved and it seemed exactly what it was for.

I don't think the pinch gesture specifically was the issue, but instead the "pinch to expand" meaning spreading out a stack of items with a pinch. We asked the reviewer to clarify what exactly constituted a "pinch to expand" but they just replied with the exact same wording, kinda frustrating.

I'm scott, the developer that was rejected. The other app was 1000 ultimate experiences by lonely planet. After seeing it in the app store i can see how they might use the same gesture.

We asked the reviewer to clarify and they just replied with the same unclear language but specific to our app. They did specifically ask us to remove the "tap and pinch to expand gesture." When we replaced it with just the tap they let it through.

One thing I have to say is after trying the gesture on the device and not just the simulator it's was a little slow but still usable. We've since fixed it so we'll see if it gets through in the future.